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Creating Innovators: Why America's Education System Is Obsolete

America’s last competitive advantage — its ability to innovate — is at risk as a result of the country’s lackluster education system, according to research by Harvard Innovation Education Fellow Tony Wagner.

American schools educate to fill children with knowledge — instead they should be focusing on developing students’ innovation skills and motivation to succeed, he says:

“Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially… Today knowledge is free. It’s like air, it’s like water. It’s become a commodity… There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.”

Knowledge that children are encouraged to soak up in American schools — the memorization of planets, state capitals, the Periodic Table of Elements — can only take students so far. But “skill and will” determine a child’s ability to think outside of the box, he says.

Over two year of research involving interviews with executives, college teachers, community leaders, and recent graduates, Wagner defined the skills needed for Americans to stay competitive in an increasingly globalized workforce. As lined out in his book, “The Global Achievement Gap,” that set of core competencies that every student must master before the end of high school is:

- Critical thinking and problem solving (the ability to ask the right questions)

“We’ve created an economy based on people spending money they do not have to buy things they may not need, threatening the planet in the process,” he says. “We have to transition from a consumer-driven economy to an innovation-driven economy.”

In an effort to discern teaching and parenting patterns, Wagner interviewed innovators in their 20s, followed by interviews with their parents and the influential teachers and mentors in the students’ lives. He found stunning similarities between the teaching styles and goals he encountered with these influential teachers at all levels of education and concludes, “The culture of schooling as we all know it is radically at odds with the culture of learning that produces innovators.” He identified five ways in which America’s education system is stunting innovation:

1. Individual achievement is the focus: Students spend a bulk of their time focusing on improving their GPAs — school is a competition among peers. “But innovation is a team sport,” says Wagner. “Yes, it requires some solitude and reflection, but fundamentally problems are too complex to innovate or solve by oneself.”

2. Specialization is celebrated and rewarded: High school curriculum is structured using Carnegie units, a system that is 125 years old, says Wagner. He says the director of talent at Google once told him, “If there’s one thing that educators need to understand, it’s that you can neither understand nor solve problems within the context and bright lines of subject content.” Wagner declares, “Learning to be an innovator is about learning to cross disciplinary boundaries and exploring problems and their solutions from multiple perspectives.”

3. Risk aversion is the norm: “We penalize mistakes,” says Wagner. “The whole challenge in schooling is to figure out what the teacher wants. And the teachers have to figure out what the superintendent wants or the state wants. It’s a compliance-driven, risk-averse culture.” Innovation, on the other hand, is grounded in taking risks and learning via trial and error. Educators could take a note from design firm IDEO with its mantra of “Fail early, fail often,” says Wagner. And at Stanford’s Institute of Design, he says they are considering ideas like, “We’re thinking F is the new A.” Without failure, there is no innovation.

4. Learning is profoundly passive: For 12 to 16 years, we learn to consume information while in school, says Wagner. He suspects that our schooling culture has actually turned us into the “good little consumers” that we are. Innovative learning cultures teach about creating, not consuming, he says.

5. Extrinsic incentives drive learning: “Carrots and sticks, As and Fs,” Wagner remarks. Young innovators are intrinsically motivated, he says. They aren’t interested in grading scales and petty reward systems. Parents and teachers can encourage innovative thinking by nurturing the curiosity and inquisitiveness of young people, Wagner says. As he describes it, it’s a pattern of “play to passion to purpose.” Parents of innovators encouraged their children to play in more exploratory ways, he says. “Fewer toys, more toys without batteries, more unstructured time in their day.” Those children grow up to find passions, not just academic achievement, he says. “And that passion matures to a profound sense of purpose. Every young person I interviewed wants to make a difference in the world, put a ding in the universe.”

“”We have to transition to an innovation-driven culture, an innovation-driven society,” says Wagner. “A consumer society is bankrupt — it’s not coming back. To do that, we’re going to have to work with young people — as parents, as teachers, as mentors, and as employers — in very different ways. They want to, you want to become innovators. And we as a country need the capacity to solve more different kinds of problems in more ways. It requires us to have a very different vision of education, of teaching and learning for the 21st century. It requires us to have a sense of urgency about the problem that needs to be solved.”

Wagner is not suggesting we change a few processes and update a few manuals. He says, “The system has become obsolete. It needs reinventing, not reforming.”

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I Invite Tony Wagner to visit NCCL School in Newark, Delaware. The school allows children to be innovators. They learn to work together instead of competing for grades (it is non-graded) They do not use standardized testing. The students enjoy going to school. They are comfortable talking with their teachers. They are taught how to explore and discover so they understand the concepts instead of just memorizing facts. They immerse themselves in their studies and get involved in the community. Some outsiders question how it can work because it is “different” from the way they were educated. One doesn’t need rows of desks and a lecturing teacher to learn, one needs guidance, support, opportunities to explore and caring teachers who truly know their students.

Let me explain some critical concepts in regard to this subject matter with an analog, knowledge is like gas in a car, critical, logical and creative thinking skills is the engine, a great collaborative attitude is like the auto body, your flexibility is the wheel… so, we need all of them, and of course imagination is a friend, sometimes long lost…

Let us not forget about the family as the cradle of security and experimentation that allows one to fail and not lose. In a competitive society winners take all and get more resources. This is a problem.

I read an article, recently, about a currency trader who could not find employment. I imagine he was competent at his actual job description, but his efforts both before and after he became unemployed involved mostly “working the network”, which appeared to be quite an expensive endeavor. I marveled that such an intelligent man would be so limited in his approach to earning currency when he had traded it so adeptly.

Wagner’s comments reflect an accurate assessment of the lack of innovation, and as a result, the US is languishing economically and intellectually. However, this problem extends well beyond schools, and is endemic to the working world. “Corporate culture” and “networking” are buzzwords that imply the need for one to fit into a predetermined mold. Schools simply reflect the corporate culture by manufacturing new blood. The five points cited by Wagner can certainly apply to Corporate America.

I read an article, recently, about a currency trader who could not find employment. I imagine he was competent at his actual job description, but his efforts both before and after he became unemployed involved mostly “working the network”, which appeared to be quite an expensive endeavor. I marveled that such an intelligent man would be so limited in his approach to earning his own currency when he had traded it so adeptly.

Wagner’s comments reflect an accurate assessment of the lack of innovation, and as a result, the US is languishing economically and intellectually. However, this problem extends well beyond schools, and is endemic to the working world. “Corporate culture” and “networking” are buzzwords that imply the need for one to fit into a predetermined mold. Schools simply reflect the corporate culture by manufacturing new blood – they are essentially spleens. So, Wagner’s five points referring to the failed innovative culture can certainly apply to Corporate America. One cannot reinvent the schools if corporate America will not employ the graduates. The fact that the financial industry controls businesses specializing in areas like engineering, medicine, and transportation means that the innovators descend the ranks over time.

Where I find some disagreement is in Wagner’s comments about knowledge being overrated. That doesn’t mean most students should memorize the details of the Punic Wars ad infinitum. I agree that information can be looked up in seconds on a smart phone. However, knowledge is a starting point, and it is important to pair innovation with knowledge throughout the educational process, which should be life-long.

Most schools don’t emphasize the synergy between knowledge and focused creativity in enterprise. Realistically, innovation that isn’t focused on a knowledge-based reality may not benefit society in the long run. Case in point: the fall of the “dot coms” comes to mind. These were innovative enterprises that first thrived, yet most could not survive due to the realities of society.

The overall challenges to innovation are like a rocket trying to escape the earth’s gravitational field. Conquer the realities, and the theory can take off.

The John Dewey Education System is based on Bullying, and cultural denial of all traditional value, beginning with phonetics, and ending with docile graduates. Thus the Dewey Systemof Education’s “Look-Say Method,” which is intended to take students, and teach them as though they were learning the Chinese character system, or the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic System, and to abandon the English Alphabetical System! Under the Chinese Character System, only the most intelligent can get an education, when there are 7000 or 8000 or more characters that must be memorized! But the Chinese and Japanese high school graduates are only fifteen years old when they graduate high school and are thus still mentally young, flexible, and very adaptable enough, and are so good in math, that the average 22 year old American College graduate can only fit into the bottom fifth of Japanese fifteen year old high school graduates in math! The basis for this is Internationally validated math tests, validated in many languages! The Japanese and Chinese fifteen year old high school graduates are young, flexible, and very adaptable, while the American eighteen or more years old are not, and are thus docile because their minds are ruined! Thhe adoption of the John Dewey System of Education was brought about because John D. Rockefeller assigned his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., to use the vast Rockefeller Fortune to buy every states legislators to vote in its adoption.john D. Rocklefellers motive was to produce onlyDocile high school graduates! A few years earlier, in 1908, the coal miners at some John D. Rockefeller owned Ludlow, Colorado coal mines, went on strike, because the Rockefellers would not spend the money to shore them up, and make them reasonably safe, so the mines were collapsing and killing miners needlessly, to save a few dollars! The Rockefellers kicked the miners out of company housing, the miners set up a Tent City , in a near-by vacant field, loaned them by a sympathetic rancher! The Rockefellers ordered a Battalion of private detectives to open fire on the Tent City, where 1500 tents were set up for the miners, and their wives and children! The Private detectives failed to drive the striking coal miners out of town, so they would not picket the mines , thus barring entryn to any would be replacement miners. So the Rockefellers ordered their bought and paid for Governor of Coloradoto order the Colraado National Guard to olpen fire on thr Tent City! so the Governor did aand ten adult male strikers were killed plus one adult male passer by, plus ten strikers children, plus two adult women, wives of two strikers! A Rockefeller massacrer of twenty-three lives in all! For more info, search the words Ludlow, Colorado, coal miners striking, Rockefeller, and massacrer! Do not use politically correct Google nor Find Target, but go to HotSheet.com, where there aare more search engines such as dog pile.com, Search.com, etc. In the Ninteen-Ninty’s, the US hired an Ethnic Chinese to oversee the US Nuclear Weapons, because no American born Citizen could do the math, thanks to John D. Rockefeller and today’s Rockefellers (David Rockefeller and US Senator John D. Rockefeller IV {US Senator “Jay Rockefeller} and their henchmen, such as Jeb Bush. The Taiwan born Chinese head of the US Nuclear Weapons Program, passes the designs for all US Nuclear Weapons to the Red Chinese Leaders, which we know because the US has sympathizers in the highest places of the Red Chinese Governmenmt, and passed a copy of the US Nuclear Weapons Plans, back to the US! Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted for passing on nuclear information to Soviet Russia, so the people responsible for All US Citizens to be unable to do the math to head-up the US Nuclear Weapons System, and thus its loss to Red China, should not they receive perhaps 150 years without parole, like Bernard Madoff, or are these sorts of penalties, only saved for miserable little Jews?

Information Technology practically wiped out Knowledge and Wisdom from Education. Education, starting from Kindergarten to University, has become an art of Data or Information Manipulation besides some cut, copy and paste along with searching.

Without Knowledge, even strategic Data or Information,has no value or relevance. It is knowledge that brings Dreams and Visions and finally Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Unless Education is made Knowledge Intensive, America or any other country will be doomed.

Even the present Global Economic Crisis is the outcome of wrong Analysis, Projections and Forecasting based on Half-baked data or Information provided by Information Technology.

It is time for developing a Technology and System to deal with Knowledge and making Education Knowledge Intensive. We have to develop Knowledge Industries. These issues are dealt in details in our paper ‘Knowmatics- A New Revolution in Higher Education’ Journal of the World Universities Forum 4,1,2011:1-11 and some of my presentations in www.slideshare.net/drrajumathew

Tony Wagner’s work is wonderful, but the true thought leader in revolutionizing education is Dr. Roger Schank. As Dr. Schank says simply, “There are only two things wrong with the education system: 1) what we teach and 2) how we teach it.” And, after thirty years of research and curriculum development at Yale and Northwestern he has give precise guidelines for how his “Story Centered Curriculum” can turn things around. http://www.rogerschank.com. Just do a Amazon search for many of his insightful books, or check out www.socraticarts.com. His work is head and shoulders above any one else on the planet.

America has the leading minds in education, philosophy, psychology, globalization, communications, sciences, the arts, interdisciplinary studies and futurism but most of them are imported. This, however, does not mean that they are not able to develop an education system that will produce students who know how to seek out and find success based on their particular skills, interests, talents, composit of intelligences and learning styles.

On the other hand it is interesting to see how little has changed for the past 7 years – http://www.caltax.org/member/digest/jan2005/1.2005.Barrett-FixingAmericasEducationalSystem.03.htm

I find it interesting that none of the comments have addressed one of the most obvious solutions, home education. Those who homeschool aren’t all bible-thumping conservatives trying to shield children from the “evils of secular society.” Indeed, those who run in our circles are quite progressive, open-minded, socially liberal, highly educated INNOVATORS. (In one of my family’s groups, which has approximately 100 students, we have parents who run a variety of businesses, software designers, doctors, an attorney, a federal agent, farmers, artists, a professional musician, scientists, and more!) And we are raising innovative children. Yes, I understand that not every family is capable of doing this; however, anyone with a modest income and a modest education CAN make the necessary sacrifices to save their children from this failing system while still trying to advocate for system reform for those who are left behind and for those yet to come. In response to someone who mentioned that “gifted” children need the social environment of school, I’ll point out that home educated children aren’t socially backwards; in fact, they are quite the opposite. Home educated children are given the opportunity to participate in both group environments as well as to study on their own with curricula, programs like Khan Academy, or through self-led study; they have the time to learn freely without the pressures of grades, reward systems or fear of failure; they have the opportunity to take advantage of skills and talents of a rich community of parents who are willing to share what they know with eager minds. In so doing, they are able to discover their passions. And when they feel the spark of passion stirring within them, the tools of innovation have been so deeply ingrained that they are able to explore those passions to their fullest extent. The list that was mentioned in this article of “core competencies” that children should master by the end of high school is a description of many lifelong home-educated children when they have yet to enter middle school! Children in our homeschooling community are running businesses, designing computer programs, writing blogs, collaborating on science projects ad research, performing Shakespeare, composing music or mastering instruments or playing in bands, volunteering in capacities that relate to their career aspirations, exhibiting and even selling their artwork, raising livestock, organizing organic community gardens, traveling around the country and the world (and rarely do you see a homeschooled teen lurking behind their parents at a museum, bored, with their eyes focused on a gaming system or their iphone. Instead, they have researched and suggested where to go and are actively engaged and excited to be exploring) and so much more. Why aren’t educators and parents looking at the successful home education model as a starting point for school reform? Homeschooling does not mean sitting at home, reproducing the school environment in miniature. Homeschooling is putting children out into the world instead of sheltering them in what I think we all can agree is an artificial environment, sharing and utilizing the talents of all of our fellow homeschooling parents, sharing strategies, organizing learning cooperatives, leading classes, even having the children leading classes. The author of this book seems to be demanding that we as a society start to think outside the box in terms of education; however, it seems to me that most of the people screaming for this educational overhaul along with the “professional educators” are reluctant to take that leap from clinging to the rim of the box to the amazing and creative possibilities that are outside of it.